Ferrari was left to rue a painful Q3 at the F1 Singapore Grand Prix as they will start P9 and P10 tomorrow.
Carlos Sainz crashed in the final corner as he started a push lap, with Charles Leclerc losing his time at the end of the session as he exceeded track limits at turn 2. His lap would only have been enough for P7 as he struggled massively with front tyre temperature.
Speaking afterwards, the 7-time race winner was left frustrated by what happened with the tyres.
In Q1, he was P12 but comfortably was in as he did not complete his final lap. Come Q2, he was P3 behind Piastri and Verstappen.
However, it all went wrong in the final segment.
“Yeah, I mean Q1, Q2 was going well.
“I was kind of hopeful again after FP3 that went wrong, but then I got out of the box in Q3 and the front tyres were way cooler.
“So, I don’t know, we do so much preparation all the weekend to get to this one lap in quali where we know it’s as important as Monaco, and we get out of the box and we are way too cold on the front tyres.
“And that puts all of our weekend into a very bad place, so not much to say.”
Asked if it was an operational call, Leclerc said investigations will take place as to what happened as he did not have the front tyre temperature required to get the car stopped at turns 1 and 2 how he wanted.
“I don’t know, I have asked to the team in the in-lap.
“I think the investigations are still ongoing and we don’t know the exact issue yet. But the fact is we started the lap with too cold front tyres, locked up into Turn 1 and that was it.
“I never really had the front grip I wanted.”
FP3 had been a struggle for both Ferrari, placing P5 and P6, 0.9s and 1.2s off the pace respectively. Leclerc had look mightily quick in FP2 but lost confidence in the daylight. The confidence returned in qualifying, nonetheless.
“In FP3 I was not happy with the car, but also it’s very warm weather here, so I was expecting it to be not exactly where we wanted it to be.
“But we were expecting to have a strong quali, which in Q1 and Q2 confirmed that we were in the place to do a good thing.
“And then we threw everything in the bin with the Q3 tyre temperature issue, so we’ve got to investigate that.”
Pushed on whether the tyres were 10 degrees out of the window, Leclerc refused to go into detail about the number.
“I’m not going to go into the detail of the numbers, it’s not exactly that, but obviously we are speaking about 1 degree, maximum 2 degrees to get it right or completely wrong.
“It was more than that, and there was nothing to do.”
Leclerc’s teammate Carlos Sainz crashed in the final corner as he started his first attempt in Q3. The 26-year-old denied they were having general issues on the out-lap trying to keep the temperatures down.
“I don’t think so, I think we were in a good place. We’ve been competitive, also thanks to the good job we’ve done.
“I don’t know what happened on my out-lap, not on my out-lap, but on out-of-the-box temperatures, because it went all wrong from that moment on.”
With Lando Norris dominating throughout the weekend, P2 looked up for grabs between many drivers. Leclerc believes that was “maybe” a possibility with an ideal lap.
